The Franchise Awakens
One last look at where Star Wars can go after The Force Awakens
N is a poet. R is a screenwriter. We watch a lot of movies. We also spend a lot of time talking about movies. But we don’t spend enough time writing about them. So we’ve created Double Shot to reflect on the latest movies we’ve seen in our respective mediums, every other Monday until the end of time.
This week we’re getting the last word on Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
R: We had plans to watch The Force Awakens three times, but only ended up seeing it twice. Which is a shame because I remember how exciting I was to rewatch it on opening night, only to be glad it was over after the 2nd viewing.
N: I had kind of the opposite experience, the first time we watched it I was just letting the plot unfold and wasn’t that satisfied but our second viewing I felt that the first 1/2 of the movie, up until the bigger Death Star stuff, was perfect. And my excitement for the first half got me through the mediocre ending.
R: My biggest problem with the movie was that it kinda gave up all pretense of trying to surprise us by the end. Once the Death Star 3.0 shows up, we’re just reliving our memories of the first time we watched Star Wars.
It’s as much fun as any of the Star Wars rides you’d find at Disneyland: taking all our favorite elements of the movies and putting them together in new combinations without straying too far away from the thing we already know and love.
N: Yeah but sometimes I’m okay with movies that are just fun. It was good fun, not bad fun. It could’ve been a lot worse. I saw the first Hobbit movie five times in theaters, probably for the same reason people saw this movie so much, it’s a fun movie in the world you love.
R: But eventually that thrill wears off, and that’s why Disney has already planned out the next 5 years of Star Wars movies. They’re not trying to make movies with the staying power of the original trilogy. They’re in it for the momentary thrill, because they don’t want to make fans, it makes us consumers, as if Star Wars is our new iPhone and we’re all supposed to line up for the next one even though the one we already have is perfectly fine.
In our first Star Wars Double Shot I talked about my hopes for the new movie, in particular my hopes for more female characters. Just by numbers, The Force Awakens definitely had way more women than all of the original trilogy combined, both in starring roles and as background characters like X-Wing pilots and Stormtroopers.
So, the movie passes the Bechdel Test, but is that enough? After the movie came out there was a whole situation where some people who I respect (Hi Max Landis, I hope you’re reading this) were saying that Rey is a Mary Sue. But in my opinion, Rey is about as well-rounded of a character as any of the male characters in the film, meaning not that well-developed at all.
The biggest thing I noticed in the movie was that it seemed like J.J. Abrams and Lawrence Kasdan were so afraid of making characters that wouldn’t live up to the hype that they forgot to write them as real people. The Force Awakens is Rey’s superhero origin story. I say superhero because I think that’s the role she’s filling in this movie. Nowadays, perfection is assumed in our action heroes. We’ve moved on from being interested in how characters reach perfection (Luke in A New Hope) and are now more interested in what characters do with their perfection and how they succeed.
So if Rey is the superhero, what is Fin? Fin is definitely the more feminine character: he is emotional, he‘s cautious, and isn’t trying to rush into situations before thinking it through. This is typically a role more often seen in the more rational supporting female characters. There is also a scene between Rey and Fin at Maz’s that is almost an exact parallel to another scene with Han and Leia. Rey/Han are taller and Fin/Leia are shorter, due to Rey standing on a platform, but still the camera circles around them in an almost frame-to-frame parallel. Whether intentional or not, I think this movie plays around with what masculine or feminine means for film. It makes us rethink what we imagine as strong and weak and it does that all in the guise of a blockbuster sci-fi action flick.
N.
The Force Awakens is barely 3 months old now but I’m already thinking about the future. No, not Episode VII, but Rogue One, the first of the Star Wars spin-off films that I believe can break the established formulas of the Star Wars universe and turn out the be the real jewels of our new Star Wars franchise.
There was a lot to love in The Force Awakens, but a part of me was never able to escape George Lucas’s shadow. All the unique characters we meet in the first half of the film are reduced to OT analogues by the end: Rey is Luke plus Han, Poe is a clean-cut Han. And because Rey needs to be a full blown Jedi by the end of the film, even if I identified with her at the beginning of the film she feels like a different character by the end (But N has talked about that enough already).
Everything that happens in the film is done to satisfy the needs of “the saga,” which is why I have high(er) hopes for the spin offs like Rogue One: unburdened of the need to satisfy sequels, they can tell riskier self-contained stories. At the very least, this means we might have a film that doesn’t climax with the destruction of a Death Star (could you imagine that?). And without the threat/promise of a sequel, the characters might actually be in peril, a minimal improvement considering there was a definite lack of stakes knowing Rey/Finn/Poe weren’t going anywhere.
But taking a step back from screenwriter to fanboy, a film like Rogue One is exciting because it taps into the history of fan fiction and Expanded Universe stories (all decanonized when the new films were announced) that kept the Star Wars universe alive in our imaginations in between the release of each movie. The spin offs can explore questions like “What’s it like to be an awesome X-Wing fighter?” without being bogged down by the needs of the numbered installments.
Everything we know about the Star Wars universe orbits around the Skywalker family. This means the spin offs can introduce truly diverse characters: not just with skin color but by showing us characters who exist outside of the Jedi/Sith dichotomy. For all of us who never felt comfortable calling ourselves Luke/Leia/Han, maybe now we’ll find someone who looks a little more like us.
But if rumors are true that a young Han Solo is going to be shoehorned into Rogue One, forcing a Marvel-style interconnected Expanded Universe, then that could undo everything that gives me hope for the spin offs. The best thing Disney could do is reveal the true depth of the Star Wars universe by letting the X-Wing fighters at the heart of Rogue One be the heroes of their own story and not a side show to the main attraction.
R.
